I say 'still allowed' because Shakespeare did it - indeed, if he had not, our language would be poorer as a result. At least, it is thought he invented them (he could have nicked them off a bloke down the pub), a whole host of them, then used them for his own ends, to tell his story, to make his brilliant ideas even clearer. Which is somewhat of a paradox, really: if I say, 'It went groopling down the unterscape,' I am not really making myself clear. Or am I?'
The Victorians loved that sort of thing. Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, and their heirs - A.A. Milne (whose brothers, R.A.C. and Greenflag, never got the attention their roadside manner deserved) et al - made our language so much richer with their whimsical word-play and it always makes me smile. In contrast, Microsoft Word's red underscore makes me grimace, feel so guilty, so ashamed at my momentary lexical loss, that I correct and erase it and thus remove my 'mistake' immediately, often without a second thought.
However, one recent example had me reaching for my trusty Encyclopaedia Britannica Dictionary, a wonderfully 'actual' stocky tome with alphabetised orange-segment-shaped (what is the technical term for that?) cut from the pages to facilitate searching. And lo! A word that Word had no words for. And though I had purloined it, bastardised it for my own purposes, it made perfect sense and so I left it in.
A short while ago, I wrote a blog about Shakespeare's use of 'functional shifts' (read the blog here) to gain a reader's undivided attention at key points in his plots, and wondered if invented words could play a similar role. So.
The word I left in is 'regradation', and was intended to perform as an opposite to 'degradation'. The word has a geological meaning, and a legal meaning too, though not, I believe (at present at least) a meaning similar to the one I had in mind. As my finger still occasionally hovers over the 'change to' button, I urge myself to be brave, to go for it, to make the buggers think! And if they think I'm stupid, then so be it. Cos I'm not. And herein is the explanation to prove it!
The piece I am writing and in which the above example occurs, is a new chapter of my Inversion 1 novel (otherwise known as 'That bloody book'), the apposite section of which I attach below. What do you think? Does it work? Or should I conform to Microsoft's all-pervading algorithms? I'll consider this a referendum (in or out?) and act accordingly.
Extract from the soon (ha!) to be published Inversion 1, a sexy sci-fi novel.
'What are you?'
Leaves had fallen. Beetles had scurried by. Worms had turned the soil beneath me, yet still I sat still, and had done so for days, barely moving a muscle. My body - my body - craved movement and nourishment, yet functioned perfectly perfectly still and I knew it would be days more before either were strictly necessary. The girl too had been still, though not so still as I, and for not nearly so long. I lifted my narrow gaze up towards the source of the sound and spoke my first words for almost a thousand years.
'I am human, just as you are.'
'Then what is he?'
As she spoke, I sensed unexpected movement before me. Almost immediately after its death, the butchered corpse had been alive with flies. Soon, maggots had squirmed within the rotting meat and given it a grotesque semblance of life. However, this new movement was entirely different and I knew something extraordinary was taking place. The girl's voice declaimed it. Anna's fading muscle memory announced it. Though my mostly alien mind was merely fascinated, my human stomach churned.
Fat blue flies dispersed in an angry swarm. Dried blood liquified and boiled. Yellow fat leeched from the soil, flowed from the bent and broken grassy stems and coalesced, forming clumps and glutinous strands. The stumps of bones grew from the sickly morass and quickly covered themselves in steaming raw muscle. The skull rode on this rolling sea of regradation, like an ivory boat on a violent bloodied sea. Maggots wiggled their last, renounced their succulent bodies and dried to dust, their last meals quickly mingling with the writhing mass below. A clump of crimson viscera crawled like a slug, reattached itself to crimson curling worms and began to pulse. Fingers of bone encaged it. The space within filled itself with nameless gaudy organs. Now the head, reshaped and repaired, reattached and swivelled sickeningly on its axis. Eyeballs swelled, blue irises blossomed. The lenses cleared, sparked, and came alive. Shattered teeth made themselves new, bit the budding lips as if to test their progress, then clenched together in intense physical effort. The monster grew as if from the soil, struggled to its club-like feet then stumbled and steadied itself till it hunched over me. Epidermal imperfections smoothed and vanished; extremities elongated and refined; limbs flexed and stretched. It looked down at me and spoke.
'Amma.'
It pointed its tongue, stretched its lips, opened and closed its jaw. Breathed deeply. Smiled and tried again.
'Anna.'
Read the first chapter of Inversion 1, as a series of extracts, here in this very blog! Then you can tell your friends, 'I read that when it was free, long before publication, long before it went global, before the films, before the world domination, before...'
No comments:
Post a Comment